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(8)Mega Man vs (5)Crono (Losers Bracket) 2018
Ulti's Analysis At a glance, this will seem like just a regular close match in the losers bracket. For Board 8, it meant so much more. This board loves Chrono Trigger. Always has. And from the very first contest, we have watched Crono and his game get beaten down and screwed over so many times that we've just come to expect it at this point. The close losses and embarrassing choke jobs are too numerous to list in one writeup, but I've done it many times in the past and those examples are easy enough to find. The losses to Mario in 2002 and 2003. The Melee rally. Missingno. The Sonic comeback. The Knuckles comeback. Being the first one, ever, to break the Noble Nine's streak in any format. Crono and Magus killing each other so a mouse could get a win. Magus losing to a punching bag. Crono's only win over Mario meaning nothing. I could go on for a long time. Read MWC's writeup on this list: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/top10/2153-the-top-10-games-of-all-time-according-to-gamefaqs-contests That's our top ten games list that we submitted with DDJ back in the day. Chrono Trigger was #6. I'm almost positive it would be #1 if we reran that list. This site in general agrees: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/features/10year Nick has a Chrono Trigger fan page on Facial Book. I could probably make the argument GameFAQs is the #1 fan site for that game. I know it's 2018 and our vote totals suck and our site is dead now, but dammit, this was a convergence of so many things and so many people finally deciding to say fuck it. Enough is enough and we want the guy to finally clutch up. I love you too Mega Man, but Crono needed this a lot more than you did. Crono did this against a guy boosted by Smash, too, which makes this even cooler. Not that it wasn't one hell of a grind. After some early struggles, Mega Man built up a lead of 249 votes. It's the widest this match would get, and as of this match it would be second place on the list for closest 1v1 24 hours matchups -- topped only by Pikachu beating Mega Man in the legends bracket. Mega Man had quite the doozies this year, huh? After the lead peaked, Crono started to very, very slowly chip away. Come midnight, he was only down by 12 and coming on strong. Given Mega Man has the murdered-a-puppy night vote in Europe, one might expect Crono to start building a lead there. One problem. Chrono Trigger didn't come out in Europe until 2009. The one guy Mega Man might be able to win a night vote against is Crono, and it's like really? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A949JshqvbI Mega Man spent the next few hours getting a 200 vote lead again, and given how bad Chrono Trigger is during the day time (the game and all the characters seem to go from bad to worse once the morning vote hits), the match looked over. But thanks to some random miracle, cosmic vortex, black hole, happenstance, coincidence, or whatever you want to call it, Crono actually fought back with the morning. I don't know why or how, and I don't even care. Our boy was back in this thing! These two then proceeded to have dual open heart surgery all morning and half the afternoon. It was a lot of stalling, back and forth, and chipping away at each other. Think the 20 inning game this past world series, except this poll in the grand scheme meant nothing. Although I guess the Dodgers winning that game meant nothing either, thanks to the metrics idiots actively ruining baseball. Way to sit your top four home run hitters in game 2, guys. Anyway, this ultimately led to the poll being tied with five hours left. When Crono finally decided to take a lead in this damn match, he was not letting up for any reason. He would end up ultimately winning by 112. I know this poll doesn't mean much at the end of the day, but for long suffering Crono fans it was something. When you have a starving human being on death's doorstep, you can't just jump right in and feed them ice cream and weight gain shakes. It'll shock the system to death. You have to slowly ease into a normal metabolism. That's basically what this match was for Crono fans. Our boy finally clutched up. Outside of maaaaaaybe that Vincent match in 2008, when has this ever actually happened? I do love Mega Man, don't get me wrong. I wrote two guides for his games. But Crono deserved this. No one can argue otherwise. Safer777's Analysis As you see from the results this match was really exciting. These 2 were head to head the whole match. MM was ahead for around 19 hours when Crono took the lead and managed to win. Personally I didn't expected that. Also funny to see that Pikachu, MM and Crono have the same power basically. This is also one of the closest wire to wire matches since the maximum lead was from MM and that was around 250 votes. Eventually Crono won with like 110 votes. Also no lead changes strangely enough. Only 1! Also as someone told me this was Crono's first victory against a NN'er without LLF from 2005! Finally he managed to do it too! When a match is so close not much can be said. Any time these kind of matches repeat, the result can easily flip around. Still Crono won. Man imagine if Crono was in more games. He would be so strong! Also as per tradition MM did really bad in Europe and he won in USA. But he deserved a win. I will never understand how Crono can be so strong with only 1 old game on his name but there you go. Imagine if he was in Smash or we had a HD remake or something. I can only hope! Tsunami's Analysis This match was pretty much exactly what we wanted: two characters of relatively similar strength going at it. The Oracles were fairly split on this match; 30 picked Crono and 17 picked Mega Man, and on both sides, the highest pick was above 53% but below 53.5%. The Guru brackets...not so much. 101 Gurus had Mega Man winning this match, compared to just 86 who had Crono even in this match. Old trends die hard, and at the start of the contest, we thought Crono was still the weak link of the Noble Nine, except for maybe Sonic. As for the match itself, it was a barnburner. Mega Man won the first update and struggled to build a lead. 45 minutes in, he took an update by 40 votes and tacked on another 22 on the next one, only to see it almost all wiped out with a 43-vote win for Crono. At this point, a second such swing would give Crono his first lead...so Mega Man took the next update by 51 to end the first hour with a lead of 85. He'd have a similar big update at the end of the second hour to get his lead to triple digits for the first time, and he'd finish the third hour with a lead of 249. The first update of hour 4 was a dead stall, and then Crono started tearing into the lead. It took him less than two hours to get the deficit back to double digits, and with 10 minutes left in hour 6, Mega Man led by a mere 12 votes...but Mega Man refused to break, refusing to relinquish the lead and eventually getting it to 200 on the dot 3.5 hours after the local minimum of 12. It took Crono an hour and 25 minutes to halve that lead...and then another hour and 5 minutes to get back to that same deficit after Mega started fighting back again, allowing him to finally get the deficit back into double digits just before the halfway point of the match. Mega Man still refused to give up, and got it back into triple digits at the 15-hour mark. Shortly thereafter, Crono finally began the comeback that would stick, breaking through to take the lead for the first time with just 5 hours and 10 minutes left in the match, and this would prove to be the only lead change after the freeze. Crono's largest lead was a mere 137, half an hour before the end of the match, and Mega's max lead of 249 a mere 3 hours in was good for a spot in the top 5 closest wire-to-wire matches--at the time that it occurred, it was 5th overall, 4th among 1v1 matches, and second only to Mega Man's first loss of the contest among 24-hour matches. So while it did appear that Mega Man had fallen to the bottom of the Noble Nine totem pole (well, okay, there's still maybe Sonic), you almost have to feel bad for him, losing in two of the most brutal slugfests ever. Also, it should be noted that despite Board 8's well-documented pro-Crono leanings and the site as a whole having pro-JRPG leanings, Mega Man actually took the registered vote and only lost due to a deficit with unregistered voters. Oh, and this managed to get a place on the 25 most surprising 1v1 results, too, with just 8.2% of initial brackets picking Crono to win this. He did get a slight boost to 13.9% on Second Chance Brackets, though, so I guess the field of 16 looked a little more favorable to Crono than the full field did? Actually I guess that checks out; Crono had a better prediction percentage in Second Chance all the way through, even in his very first match, so I suspect there were some people out there who thought Kirby could upset Crono but didn't feel Bowser could do the same when he got there instead of Kirby. Kirby still gets overrated because of his shenanigans in '08, when we've clearly seen that he's just not as strong in 1v1s as he is in multiways. Category:2018 Contest Matches